Klaviyo Acquires Elias Torres’ Agency, Marking a Full-Circle Reunion for Tech Founders

Klaviyo, a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, has reached an agreement to acquire Agency, an AI-driven customer success startup founded three years ago by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. The specifics of the deal remain undisclosed.

Established in 2023, Agency successfully secured $32 million from notable investors such as Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis prior to the acquisition.

As part of this agreement, Torres (pictured left) will join Klaviyo as its chief product officer (CPO), overseeing Agency’s team of 25 to propel the evolution and growth of Klaviyo’s AI agents: Composer, responsible for creating marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, designed for post-sale support including returns and order tracking.

“Elias and his team developed an exceptional product at Agency,” said Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki (pictured right) in an interview with TechCrunch. “We aim to integrate that with our existing agent products to benefit 200,000 businesses—and ideally millions more in the coming years.”

For Torres, joining Klaviyo marks a significant milestone in his career. Having co-founded Performable (which HubSpot acquired in 2011) and later Drift, where he held the role of CTO for eight years until its $1.2 billion acquisition by Vista Equity in 2021, he is familiar with M&A exits.

Back in 2010 at Performable, Torres brought on Bialecki, who was one of the startup’s first engineers shortly after graduating from Harvard. Torres mentored Bialecki in navigating the early-stage startup landscape. “He absorbed everything rapidly,” Torres recalled about their collaborative experience.

Shortly after departing Performable, Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo, initially bootstrapping it. When Klaviyo secured its first external funding round in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to participate as an angel investor.
The company later accomplished a high-profile IPO in September 2023, achieving a valuation of $9.2 billion.

Despite Klaviyo’s stock experiencing a downturn similar to other SaaS companies, both Torres and Bialecki assert that the platform’s extensive customer data provides its AI agents a competitive edge against rivals like Decagon and Sierra.

“Elias and I have united around the goal of providing agents for businesses to serve their customers,” Bialecki stated, expressing his enthusiasm about collaborating with Torres once more, reminiscent of their early days at the onset of the cloud era. “This is the next major technological revolution: agents. Let’s reunite and build something great.”